CMP SERIES CERTIFICATION MADE POSSIBLE

ability to make a significant difference in a com- munity is the limited amount of time they spend there. “How much impact can you have in one afternoon?” Heisman said. “What is it that you can do that is possible? If you go to an afterschool program and play with the kids, you’re going to have a one-time impact that is going to kind of evaporate really quickly. If you tutored for one day, that would be nice, but a kid who can’t read well needs to be tutored for six months. If you can do something like building a playground, you have the ability to create something that has some sus- tainable impact.” With that in mind, Smith said that she looks for opportunities “to help the more social-enterprise kind of organizations that are actually employing people and helping them to make a living,” because those efforts have a more sustainable impact. When looking at which charity to support with

a CSR activity, Heisman said, it’s important to recognize that some organizations are simply not equipped for volunteers. “People always hate to hear this when I say it, but it takes staff time and money to organize a volunteer effort,” she said. “If you want to go paint a fence, who is going to buy the paint and get the paintbrushes and get you guys ready and put the aprons on and then clean up everything? Some charities just aren’t set up to have a ton of volunteers, so you’re actually costing

the charity time and resources to manage you.” She advised meeting professionals to be sensitive to that, adding that charities “don’t exist to have you come in for half a day.” One way around this, Heisman said, is to work with local organizations that are set up to manage volunteers. “You might want to find the organiza- tion near those communities [where your meeting is being held] that actually helps match volunteers to projects,” she said. “Maybe you have a whole list of projects and people divide up into smaller groups, so everybody doesn’t bombard a small charity at once.”

DO YOUR HOMEWORK Heisman also thinks it’s important for planners to consider whether they would “rather be a little fish in a big pond or a big fish in a little pond” — by working with a local chapter of the Boys and Girls Club of America, or finding a small organization in the community without national ties. She suggested that planners consult the local United Way chapter and some of the private foundations in their host destination to see what they are funding in the community. Because they have “program officers that are there on the ground all the time,” Heisman said, these foundations “are usually very good at sorting out who is doing a good job. I would really encourage — if people

‘Brilliant’ Repurposing

A simple CSR effort that really stood out for the Vancouver Convention Centre’s Claire Smith, CMP, was part of the Interna- tional Congress and Convention Association’s 2004 ICCA Con- gress, held in Cape Town, South

Africa. The organizers “made some really interesting choices on the front end that really impacted the community,” she said. Usually, on-site ICCA staff members wear green shirts with the ICCA logo on it so attendees can identify them, but in Cape Town, they wore football jerseys that had the name of a child on the back, and a number.

“They knew that a local boys football team needed jerseys,” she said, “and they went and

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bought them — they got the specifications, the sizes, the names, and had them all done. The staff wore them throughout the conference, and at the end of the week, they were all sent off and laundered — and then the kids had their football jerseys. And to me that was brilliant. Because it was doing something that was specific for the need rather than giving somebody something that they don’t really want. And they did a couple of other things — the

delegate bags were book bags, so they actually bought book bags for a township. And they had very little logo on it, very little. And after the conference, we all donated them, and the kids used them after the fact as book bags. [It’s about] making decisions that are more inten- tional [about items that] can be repurposed in a way that is meaningful.”

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